10 March 2015

Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to
include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst
Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to
distinguish themselves from the 18th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy
does not seem quite so important today as it appears to have been in 1908, but
it is still useful.

The latter pamphlet is made
out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses
on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”,
a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to
the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Karl Marx had a Doctorate in
Philosophy but he did not, as a “Marxist”, write a book of philosophy as such,
except insofar as his long “Capital” project could be taken as philosophy, and
there are indeed some overtly philosophical statements here and there among the
preparatory works and in the three originally-published volumes of “Capital”.

So, what is linked from this
post comprises the major part of the overt philosophical work of Marx, Engels
and Lenin. It is a tiny amount when compared to the world’s literature on
philosophy.

It is therefore clear that
the classical Marxist literature does not provide us with a full, exclusively
Marxist exposition of philosophy. Perhaps this is fitting, because Marxism is
after all not outside of the main stream of learning. As we have seen, it is a
continuation of, as well as a reaction to, Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work
stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so on.

Taken together, all of this
means that for the kind of philosophy that is necessary for revolution, the
revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx and Engels, and study the full
discipline of philosophy, its history, its development and its meaning. This is
exactly what Lenin began to do in the early 1900s.

In “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel several times in passing, and briefly,
though not in this particular chapter. It would seem that Lenin’s interest in
Hegel really only got going later, at about the time (1914) when he prepared
his ‘Conspectus
of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive
on MIA is here.

Lenin is saying in this short
chapter that that the test of truth is practice, and this provides us with a
continuity in relation to our previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.

The next part will be the
last in this Hegel series.

Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso
was the most distinguished painter of the 20th Century, and a
communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish
village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.